


the dry season

by arbitrarily



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Canonical Character Death, Cousin Incest, Dust Bowl, F/M, Gen, Horse Racing, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-15 22:52:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11815839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: In 1933, the remaining Starks found themselves again under the same roof. They continued on as they had before: they survived.





	the dry season

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea where any of this came from. Vague-ish spoilers for the majority of the series apply. Also here's [a pretty great folk cover of the _Game of Thrones_ theme song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWaOpaVhrE)

 

Or, you could get in your car and drive away.  
Because some roads you shouldn't go down.  
Because maps used to say, "There be dragons here."   
Now they don't. But that doesn't mean the dragons aren't there.  
_FARGO_

 

 

 

I. THE WOLVES CAME HOME

 

There was no rain. Arya tended to the land each day with stubborn resilience while Sansa kept house, worked the track for extra money. She collected the bets. She was good at her job, and she hated that. Found something distasteful for a talent to emerge in such an improper venue. But she took the money and she kept her face flat. This was Winterfell; this was home. They both ignored Bran, who when he spoke sounded like a mystic escaped from P.T. Barnum. And if Sansa ignored Jon, that was entirely her own business.

  

  

They called this place the Seven Kingdoms, tongue in cheek, on account of the seven counties who had prospered when oil was first struck. There wasn’t much prospering anymore, not unless you were Targaryen Ltd. or Lannister Savings and Loan. 

They all knew the threat of Targaryen Ltd.: they had not only bought up the local oil fields but they were laying track for their Dragon line of railroad, cutting through and changing the entire landscape. They bought up the wells same as they had tried to take over the California gold mines the Lannisters had controlled. History repeated itself. Nothing to be done but endure.

  

 

Jon had been out towards Galveston working the oil wells when the Stark family met their dark fate. His family. Murder, abduction, _if seen please contact the Sheriff for reward_. No one knew where he had gone so no one could tell him what had happened until it was too late. Until it was history. That was the heavy cost he had to live with: he was gone when they had needed him. He wore that guilt, heavy and obvious, on his shoulders. 

He spoke of it the way a holier man asked for penance.

“What good you think you’d’ve done?” Sansa asked him. Her voice wasn’t mean about it, only tired. Like she knew there would be no answering for it, not really. She stood up from the table all the same, her movements sharp and abrupt. She took his plate and dropped it in the sink.

He had only come home because the company had sent him to work the local well they struck. He had once thought of this as good news.

  

 

They called the town Winterfell on account of when Ned Stark’s daddy had first settled. Snow had just begun its descent down from an uncaring and unseeing gray-black sky. The snow clung to what scant, spindly branches remained, reaching up like the bony arms of the starved. The snow stuck around that first month of his arrival from the east and it was, he thought, the most beautifully ugly place he had ever seen. He named it Winterfell the same way a man might have said he wished for luck. Ain’t snowed a flake since. Ain’t snowed once, even if up until the moment Ned Stark died — his fate met on the steps just outside the Kings Landing track with a knife to the throat, not even a clean death to be earned for the most stand-up man in seven counties over — he was fond of saying, Winter is coming.

In fact, it never came.

 

 

 

 

 

II. WISE BLOOD

 

They made Arya wait the better part of an hour before she was admitted to his office. Tywin Lannister, of Lannister Savings and Loan. He kept the shutters drawn over the windows and Arya approached him through the dark to meet him across his wide desk. His mouth was grim, worse still when he attempted a smile. 

She was here to barter down what her family owed. 

Lannister Savings and Loan was bleeding them dry with interest payments and back taxes owed on the farm. It was a slower, more ignoble death, and Arya counted each cent handed over to them with the same furious and bloody reverence with which she guarded the list of names she kept on her.

“Does it bring you joy to prosper while so many of us suffer?”

“It brings me wealth, Miss Stark.”

“Tell it to the Lord, I guess. He’ll be surely curious, too,” she said, rising to leave. No pride to be found in keeping her cool, her voice steady and unwavering. Instead, it was impatience she felt. Fury sparking up inside of her, only to be met by futility. She wanted a knife in her hand, a rope. In Carson City she watched a fella get strung up by the neck, hung until dead. She had asked what’d he done to earn him such a fate, and the man she asked told her, “I ain’t heard, but nothing good I’d suppose.” Arya supposed similar; she supposed some men deserved no better fate. 

The door to Tywin Lannister’s office shut behind her.

 

 

When Arya had first come home, looking like something the barn dog dragged in from the slop heap, the only word for how she came back was wrong.

“It’s my book of debtors,” Arya said to Sansa with the same authority Sansa assumed a genuine lawman would adopt. There were no genuine lawmen in these parts, only men with guns and men with dented tin they called badges and men who wore authority like a shoplifted suit designed for a better built man. The loose leaf pages were bound with fraying twine and sat there on the family kitchen table between the girls. Sansa had asked Arya, “What’s this then?” when she found Arya sitting there with the closed booklet that morning. The lefthand corner of the pages were curled, darkened and muddied.

“They owe us money?” Sansa asked with some excitement. Of the great many things the Stark family needed, money ranked chief amongst.

“Nah,” Arya said. She slouched down in her chair and the legs scraped against the unpolished kitchen floor. “Something better,” she said.

_It’s not mud_ , Sansa thought wildly. She still had her grace and wits about her, so she did not gasp. Her hands shook as she poured the coffee. When she turned back around, Arya was gone. So was the book.

 

 

While she was away — or so Sansa had taken to referring to her absence — Arya had found Gendry had gone ahead and not only decided to get himself a failing ranch but to grow into a man. She felt a curious sting of betrayal she did nothing to interrogate. He had lived without her. They all had. Sansa. Jon. Gendry. Bran. Everyone but their mother and their father, Robb and Rickon. Everyone but those Arya had decided needed to pay.

“Is it true what they been saying?” Arya asked. She leaned into the fence; the post wobbled under her weight. He’d need to get this replaced, too. Leave it to Gendry Waters to take on a cattle ranch after the crash. 

“Gonna need to give me a bit more than that. Ain’t learned mind-reading.” He tapped his temple. “Yet.” Arya didn’t smile.

“The Lannisters are laying down roots.”

Arya had returned home in part because she had heard tell the Lannisters of Lannister Savings and Loan had gone and built themselves a real ranch compound not all that far from where the Stark family themselves had once lived and prospered. There were coincidences, she had thought, and then there was this. 

Gendry was still, watching her, weighing her — she knew it. He jerked his head towards the east. “Next county over. Casterly Rock,” he said. 

“Ain’t that something.”

“Arya,” he said, a warning.

“I said, ‘ain’t that something,’” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

III. THE HISTORIAN

 

Bran took down first their family history, and then, the history of the region. It kept him busy.

“No one’s gonna wanna read that,” Arya said.

It kept him busy. He did not listen to her. He wrote of the past. He said, sometimes, ignored, he could see the future.

 

 

A single page slipped from Bran’s overstuffed composition notebook. He never asked for a new one, and though Sansa imagined they could scrape together the change to buy him a new one, she never offered.

Either Bran did not notice the missing page or he had left it deliberately for her.

_As the crow flies_ , was all he had written on the page. His writing was neat and cramped, a man’s penmanship. Sansa did not touch it. She left it there, waiting. It was gone when she set the table for supper.

 

 

Bran had stayed. He never left. He only had the lone remaining farmhand for company, a large man, stupid at the tongue, only able to say his name as he lumbered around the property, curiously bashful — unclear whether it was on account of his size or his limited vocabulary. Bran watched and he waited, though what for, he never told.

 

 

There were a lot of bad times they were never gonna talk about in the name of moving forward. The time they were apart. Their father’s murder. The slaughter of their mother and brother and that entire wedding party down in Las Cruces. Rickon. Sansa’s abduction by the marauding Ramsay gang. Jon’s near death on the oil fields when the pump blew, hitting sour gas. Arya's disappearance and the strange creature who returned to them following her absence. Bran’s fall into the dry well and his broken legs, broken back, his life confined to what was once their mother’s parlor and now served as his bedroom, his entire world. The windows overlooked a field where once a garden and now nothing grew.

 

 

 

 

 

IV. FAMILY TREE

 

“Place your bets! First, second, third — place your bet, get your coin!” Sansa rattled off the bets, a barker at a carnival, a calliope of pounding hooves against packed dirt that erupted in dust, more dust, the men who pounded their fists against unpainted fence posts, beer sloshed and spilled. Her hands were quick with the money, creasing and smoothing the used bills in her hand. She liked the feel of money in her hands, even if it wasn’t hers to keep.

 

 

Ygritte got Sansa the job. Nothing reputable to it, much to Sansa’s sense of shame. But money was money, and same went for opportunities: you took what you could. They called the track King’s Landing and folks trusted it with their cash more than any Savings and Loan.

Jon brought ten dollars to the track and he placed it in the palm of Sansa’s hand. His fingernails were dirty, cuff of his rolled shirt stained black from the oil derricks. 

“Jon,” she said. They didn’t have the money and he knew it. He almost smiled. 

“Put it on Ghost,” he said.

“Jon,” she said again. He curled her hand around the bill and it crumpled in her sweaty grip.

“You’ll bring us luck,” he said. As if luck had ever earned any of them a good goddamn.

As it turned out, that day it earned them forty dollars.

 

 

They had all thought of Jon Snow as their brother even after they had learned he wasn’t. All of them, except Sansa. Like their mother, she had thought of him as an interloper. A stain on the family to think their father had ever laid down with a woman not his wife. Not their mother. In truth of fact, he hadn’t, but neither truth nor fact mattered when it came to the oily free flow of gossip. That was the one commodity they all found they were rich with: talk. Cheap talk. 

“Jon ain’t even look like us,” Sansa had said. 

And he didn’t. Dark curled hair, an expression that skewed petulant and confused when at rest. Despite that, he had the same quiet strength as the rest of them. And why shouldn’t he: he was their cousin. Their father’s sister’s son, such a scandal they had gone ahead and buried his parentage along with her body. 

“He’s still kin,” Arya had said with a characteristic of stubborn sentimentality Sansa did not think belonged to her.

 

 

When Arya was away, Gendry would stop by to visit. He told Sansa that he was just checking in, wanted to make sure she and Bran were well. 

Gendry had originally worked at the smithy, at least back when Arya had known him. The price of progress was the smithy was gone. So he fell into work as a ranch hand out at old Davos’s ranch only for the two of them to discover Gendry was in fact, though a bastard, the rightful heir to the ranch. Davos didn’t mind it, didn’t see it as him losing anything. He stayed on at the ranch; Gendry had much to learn. He told Sansa all this with a conversational indifference she recognized as an act. So she feigned her own interest and this meant, she thought, they had an accord.

Sansa had always thought that love was meant to come by easy and without thought when it came to family. Sitting there at the old kitchen table, the same table their mother had served them at, where Father would come in, his beard damp from the washing up, and tell them of his day, his attempt to educate obvious in his tone and choice of words. Arya ate messy, Bran quietly, (she did not think of Rickon), Robb distracted and itching for the outside world, a world far from that kitchen and that farm and perhaps from each of them. 

Sitting there with Gendry, watching his face only half in profile, she found it just as easy to hate her sister.

 

 

 

 

 

V. DEBTOR’S PRISON

 

“Gimme one of those,” Arya said. She visited Gendry in the evening, when her own work was done at their farm for the day. She found him perched along the edge of the open bed of the back of his pick-up, smoking, eyes squinted in her general direction. 

“Nah,” he said. He went on smoking. Gendry was a man who knew how to carry his life. His anger, resentment, had been blunted over the years. She didn’t know how to respect that.

She plucked the cigarette from his mouth and turned away from him.

 

 

Rickon died young and alone. A child; they all were. He died when they took Sansa. He was killed when Arya ran. “What good you think you’d’ve done,” and that was the last she had to say on the matter.

 

 

She said their names each night. Arya matched her cries when they came with the coyotes. She was better with a knife than a gun. She learned how to carve a man’s life away from his body. How all that blood — near black and thick, clotting, nothing she ain’t never seen before on the farm — tasted less like justice and more like her birthright. 

It was like each time she left a part of herself behind. That was fine. She was so full of sorrow there was more than enough to go around. 

 

 

Arya learned to kill from an outlaw by the name of Jaqen H’ghar she met outside of Little Rock. 

“You foreign or something?” she had asked, frowning, his name clumsy in her mouth.

He drew his blade, a mocking smile canting his mouth. 

“A girl must learn manners,” he said, and then he lunged. 

 

 

Arya rode on the backs of trains, hopping on without being seen as the trains left the station. She rode freight, avoided the other men who did the same — all apple cores and missing teeth, the stink of whiskey and unwashed clothing. They all told the same stories of stymied ambition and thwarted opportunity, poverty earned by another’s mistake, the twin siren calls of oil and gold — the former had caught them while their daddies and their grandaddies fell for the latter. 

“All this country is, boy,” one of them had told her. “A mirage you keep scrambling after. You never get to drink.”

Arya had said nothing, watched the landscape click by in the increasing evening gloom. The hot air ruffled her shorn hair. 

“Where you headed?” he asked her then.

“To kill a man,” she said with unearned confidence.

“I’ll bet,” he said. “You take what you’re owed, boy.”

 

 

 

 

 

VI. KISSED BY FIRE

 

Ygritte spent each day at the track. No one could pronounce that girl’s name for shit, called her “ _why_ -greet.” After extensive vexation on behalf of the aforementioned name, she accepted the fact: nothing doing. 

Her people had come from up north, Montreal fur traders, and before that the Scandinavian north. She lived with the big man Tormund everyone assumed was her uncle. He wasn’t. 

 

 

“Girl could mount anything,” one of the boys at the track had said, watching too, no charity in his tone. Jon could barely bring himself to take his eyes off the girl and her horse to look at the boy. Ask him where he thought he got off talking like that. He forgot the boy; he watched the girl. Her hair was red and streamed loose from her braids behind her on the afternoon heat. 

 

 

Her name was Ygritte, she told him, and she rode as a jockey. He frowned, nothing malicious in it, just a restructuring of his world order. She had seen it before in men who intended no real harm. 

“Girls don’t ride in races,” he said. Like she ain’t heard that before, shit.

“Then close your eyes and play pretend. This girl rides.”

The way he looked at her was nothing short of marveled, so she grinned and bared teeth. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she said with a great fondness that she found, with pleasure, she meant. 

 

 

They said the girl rode like she just got word her house had gone and burnt on down. No one else on the track could match her frenetic pace without a corresponding jolt of panic. The fear they had lost control. But Ygritte never looked panicked; in fact, she would smile, her eyes squinted, freckled nose bunched up as her mouth cut across in a broad exultant grin. Like if she rode fast enough she might finally meet Him, and ask: are you God or the Devil?

 

 

They sat together on the slanted front porch of the beat-up house she shared with Tormund. Tormund was out, but Jon thought maybe that didn’t matter: Ygritte spoke of the man without fear or consequence. As if they shared authority. It was yet another thing he couldn’t understand about her and where she’d come from. 

Night had fallen and he patiently rolled a cigarette, his large stained hands nimble with the paper and the loose tobacco. The porch was unlit and his face glowed when he finally struck a match.

Ygritte had curled her body around him, her sweaty face pressed into the center of his back. “You smell real foul,” she told him.

“I know it,” he said. His hair was damp and dust clung gritty to the both of them. The tobacco was cheap but he smoked it anyway. 

He smoked, and Ygritte asked him what he was thinking of doing to her, her voice light and curious, playful. He liked that about her, so he told her he had it in mind to take her to ground, hold her there, and see if she might let him kiss her. He had not kissed her yet and he found he thought of it often and with great distraction. Ygritte did not react, or at least not in any way he could perceive — her face still pressed into his shirt, her legs still bracketed around him. 

He let himself be brave, and with his hands he tested the strength of her legs. He was met with unyielding muscle, her thighs hard and well-used. Ygritte was easy to want, and he supposed she’d be as easy to love. That surprised Jon: he had thought such a thing was meant to be hard-fought and hard-won. 

He would later find it was, albeit with a different woman.

He felt as much as heard the small hitch in her breath as his hand crawled higher up her leg.

“You thinking of holding me down?” she asked. 

Jon’s hand covered the width of her thigh. “More,” he said. She laughed. 

 

 

Jon loved Ygritte. Loving Ygritte was gloriously simple; she was something good and removed from their family. 

He had Sansa at home.

The tension had always been there with Sansa. It was part of the reason why Jon had run off to Galveston in the first place (the first reason being he had learned Ned had never been his father; it was the lying that had got him more than anything, that Ned couldn’t trust him to know who he really was). Sansa knew this. 

Sansa sat up all night. She was there when Jon returned home from spending his night in Ygritte's bed. She didn’t sleep. This was yet another thing none of them spoke of: it was simply accepted — Sansa did not sleep. Jon paused in the doorway rather than taking to the stairs. Sansa sat at the kitchen table, lit by the kerosene lamp she had in front of her. The house still hadn’t been wired for electric, much as Arya promised she’d get it taken care of. 

After a beat where they stared at each other, Sansa asked Jon, “What’s she let you do to her?” She asked it in a cold, almost clinical voice. Like she had no real stake in the answer.

Maybe it was because of that or maybe because he had some of the moonshine Tormund had stocked at his place, but he told her, matched that same flat tone. He told her about his mouth, the warm wet place between Ygritte’s legs, the pull of her fingers through his hair. He told Sansa how he made her come. Sansa listened, her face unyielding in the flickering light.

Jon loved Ygritte. She made Jon safe to Sansa if only for this: he was taken. He was nothing for her to fear. Nothing between them could be real, so long as Ygritte was there. She kept them safe. Sansa thought perhaps, if only for that, she loved her, too.

 

 

 

 

 

VII. THE RED HOUSE

 

They shot the boy in the back. Rickon went down in a heap and she knew he was dead, knew it with the same knowledge that she understood all was truly lost now, and when they clamped their hands around her thin wrists she had screamed and —

She didn’t want to remember anything more. What good, and all that.

 

 

They took her to a house with red curtains over the windows. A man named Littlefinger was waiting for her, or at least that was what he told her when they brought her in, dirty and tired, her face tear-streaked and swollen. “I’ve been waiting for you, girl,” he said, and then he showed her to her room.

No other woman in that house with the red curtains had liked Sansa. It was, she assumed, because no man was allowed to touch her. That was until they were. After, the women still did not like her. By then, Sansa did not like them either. She didn’t like anything — not the ticking of the clock she focused on when spread on her back; not her length of red hair men admired before their affections soured and then they’d pull; not the lock on the door she practiced opening with her own bent hairpins in the middle of those hot afternoons as the rest of the house slept in preparation for the night to come; not that despite everything her memory endured and it was all stamped on her, the good and the bad, indelible; not the men who promised they’d save her and then left her; not thoughts of her family, alive or dead, there was no refuge to be found, not anywhere, not even with escape. 

 

 

Her escape came through a woman the size of a man. She called herself Brienne and she wore her hair short and close cropped to her head, the sleeves of her chambray shirt rolled over her strong forearms. She came with a posse of Lannisters. This was before Jaime, the eldest son, a war hero or traitor dependent on who you asked, had lost his hand. 

“I met your mother, once,” Brienne had said to her. They were in the parlor, the red curtains drawn, the evening hot. The men she had come with entertained, but Littlefinger always liked to keep Sansa held back, like a prized jewel a man had to beg for. 

“I don’t have a mother,” Sansa said. Brienne’s face in reply was the kindest thing Sansa had seen, perhaps in her entire life. 

Brienne shook her head. “Your mother wouldn't want you here,” she said. And then she took her with her.

 

 

She remembered when Jon came home.

He begged forgiveness, but all she had left to give was the space in between her open arms, her body pressed to his. The length of her throat, the gap between shoulder and neck where he buried his face. She only had the void her body created so she offered him that. She offered it without expectation, too  hard to think anything of any kind could grow between two people here when the land had rejected any and everything else that had tried to take root.

She felt his mouth still moving against her skin; she pretended she could not hear him.

 

 

 

 

 

VIII. KINDLING, BRIMSTONE, DUST

 

Wasn’t anything natural in the girl’s death. They all knew that.

They were all there, all stood witness, the day Ygritte was thrown from that horse she knew and loved, trampled underfoot. Dead. 

“She was a beautiful girl,” Jon heard a mourner say to Tormund at her funeral. He did not recognize the man, nor the Irish lilt to his voice.

Tormund stood there, impassive with his arms crossed, his dark suit ill-fitting.

“Would you shut the fuck up,” he said.

 

 

They were sat in Jon’s old car when Jon had asked Ygritte, as delicate as possible, a carefulness to the way he chose his words that made Ygritte’s face go cold and closed-off, as if he had made her feel delicate herself in response, about her and Tormund.

What he would remember was her smile. He would miss the flash of uncertainty over her face, the self-loathing that accompanied that. Of all things, Ygritte demanded surety, including of herself. He was supposed to know this.

“You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she said, both sour and sweet. He would only recall the latter.

 

 

“I won’t be bound by no man,” Ygritte was fond of saying. She said it in warning, often to Tormund, well-aware he was the wrong audience for such a proclamation. Tormund had no interest in ownership. Ownership conferred responsibility, in particular of a woman. And he had no interest in shouldering the responsibility of a woman like Ygritte — all wild, unfashionably long hair, astride a stamping, flying racehorse, muscles bunched, skin burnt and freckled, that mercurial mouth, flirting so easily between cruelty and kindness. He was perfectly content to share that rundown house with her, neither of them diligent in their chores. He was content to share a bed when she decided she wanted him — always that willful set to shoulder and chin as she came to him, the dare implicit in the equally hardened slant of her mouth, the cast to her eyes. Go ahead and ask me, she never said. Make me tell you what I want. He never asked. Instead he took what she would give, his body stretched out under her as she rode him with that same reckless lack of inhibition as when she raced around the track. If he were the sort of man to think such things, he might have supposed this was a kind of love. Ygritte had no need for such a thought. She took what she wanted.

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Sansa said. Jon sat alone on the porch, the night dark, the jar next to him empty. His eyes were wet and unfocused as they watched everything but her. 

Sansa stepped closer. She dragged her hand through Jon’s hair, swayed into him as he moved towards her. He buried his face in the front of her dress, his hand curled tight along her hip.

 

 

 

 

 

IX. THE PURE AND THE DAMNED

 

“Place your bets, play your luck.”

“If you insist.” Sansa inclined her head towards the voice. Tyrion Lannister, a savant of the track and the bet and debauchery in general. Sansa grinned; Tyrion came to her each race, Lannister money handed off with the same smug expectation of a healthy return.

“Let’s make it interesting," she said. "What do you say?”

She bet the farm, the back taxes owed his father, and Tyrion accepted her bet. She knew as she shook his hand Arya would be furious, Jon the same, his rage a quieter, more frightening beast. But Sansa knew, even if no one else did. No horse could beat Ghost. She had worked here for months. She knew patterns, she knew how men bet. She knew if anyone was to ever bring their family luck, it would be her. 

And sure enough, Sansa won.

 

 

It wasn’t enough for Arya. Cash did not carry the same weight as flesh, blood. 

She had a plan, she told Gendry, to go after the Lannisters.

“Who’s next then?” Gendry asked. She didn’t like his tone, the disapproval rising up like something she’d earned a long time ago but he was only giving voice to it now.

“The fellas that went and took my sister.”

“And then? The law ain’t yours to enforce.” He said it with the exhausted patience she was familiar with most folks using to address her.

“Y’know, that’s what my daddy said, right before they put him down.”

“Arya.”

“Like a dog in the street,” she said. 

“You gonna continue the tradition?”

She snapped her head around to look at him. He was watching her, had been the entire time. She could tell by the stillness of him, the tightness of his face. He had small lines around his eyes now, as if each year without her had been sketched there for her to see. She had missed him; she had thought that often when away from here. Sansa was right: to call it _away_ was an easier name than anything else you could call what Arya had done. She had missed him, but he was still a goddamn fool. 

“He ain’t done nothing wrong,” she said. Her shoulder jerked in what might’ve been called a shrug. “It’s justice. It’s only right.”

 

 

She had been a kid the last time he saw her. And now, a feral child who had grown up wrong. She wore the same pair of worn-out Levis everywhere she went, baggy on her stick frame, faded at the knees, rolled at her bony ankles.

She dragged his hand by the wrist to her waist, to the button of her jeans, but Gendry remained still. They were in the back of his truck and he hadn’t even kissed her yet. Instead, she had pulled him to her, her grip strong, everything about her strong and deadly, and he found he was afraid to know what she wanted from him. 

“What? You’re not man enough to put hands to a girl?” Arya said. Her tone matched the sneer on her face, dragging her bottom lip down, harsh and mean. Her breath was hot against his face.

“Arya.” He said it the same way he thought he would say, _don’t talk to me like that_ , if Arya was the sort of girl ( _woman_ ) who would listen to a boy ( _man_ ) like him.

She said nothing then. He couldn't recognize that wild desperation on her face. Like she was on a precipice only she knew. He thought that she had been out on that ledge all by her lonesome for a good long time now. So he kissed her, well aware that could never be enough, and he did as she asked and he held her tight enough to bruise, harsh enough that he could almost believe some good could come between two people like them. 

 

 

The sky was black. They would not sell the oil field, so it burned. Targaryen Ltd. — it was said the corporation was run by a woman now, and both Sansa and Arya liked that though for their own reasons. Jon did not have an opinion; he was in the habit of letting women do as they pleased.

The field burned, a towering inferno bursting up out of the well that had promised them all so much wealth. Maybe even security, if such a thing existed. The stench was toxic, dangerous. That was just like the land, Sansa didn’t say. It took everything you had.

“Come inside, Jon,” she said instead. He took her hand.

 

 

 

 

X. TWO SISTERS

 

Together, Sansa and Arya surveyed the farm, the work that Arya had put into it. The sun was setting and Sansa raised a hand to shield her eyes.

“It ain’t right, what they’d done to us,” Arya said. 

“No. But what you done, we done, ain’t right either.” Arya did not look at her sister but instead at the land. She had to know, Arya thought, that she would do anything to protect this, to protect them. That there was nothing she would not do, nothing —

“Alright then,” Arya said. She dusted her hands on the thighs of her worn-out jeans. “We’ll live.”

 

 

Some days, he didn’t know her. 

Jon was a man beset on all sides by guilt. For leaving, for Ygritte, now Sansa. 

If Sansa felt guilt, she never showed it. She sat there, calm and stoic, across from her at that kitchen table. The sun had yet to rise.

She drank her coffee and she did not say a word.

 

 

Rumors spread in their own wayward path through Winterfell, Sansa often the first and Arya the last to know. When Arya got word Gendry’s ranch was alight with burning mesquite and he was fixing to leave, she abandoned her own work.

She drove that rusted-out old pick-up to the Davos property (as they all still called it even though in neither nor deed had it ever been his) with a single-minded fury. She liked that single-minded fury; it gave her clarity. It was in that same state of mind that she had left Winterfell in the first place. It told her what needed doing.

She pulled up through the gate, the truck pitching over the uneven terrain snaking down towards the old ranch. She leapt out of the driver’s seat, the door slamming, and there was Gendry — sweaty and soot-stained, those big callused hands she knew the width and force of, looking familiar and awful all at once.

“What’s this I hear tell of you turning hide?” Her arms hung limp at her side, ready. 

“How’s that now?”

“You’re leaving,” she said, indignant. 

“I ain’t,” he said; so, “Oh,” she said.

He smiled like he approved of the idea of her rendered without words.

“Well, alright then,” she said, moving to get back into her truck. 

Gendry laughed then, a man who caught not an animal in a snare but a girl in her own truth. “Alright then.” His mouth was wide enough to eat her. She near considered it. “You don’t want a beer or nothing?”

Arya shook her head, pulled the driver-side door shut with a worrying rattle. The tang to the smoke that swept towards them made her eyes water, the heat of it all-encompassing and overwhelming. And right. The sky above felt right too, heavy and expectant. She thought perhaps of rain, that it would come, and after that, winter.

“Nah,” she called over the wind. “I gotta get home to my sister.” And so she did.

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [the burning season](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12020544) by [sevenfoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes)




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